


Smoke and Solace

by CrackingLamb



Series: One Shot Wonders, A Collection of Junkyard Dog Stories [6]
Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Comfort Sex, Established Relationship, F/M, Smoking, so many feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2017-12-17
Packaged: 2019-02-15 20:43:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13039038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CrackingLamb/pseuds/CrackingLamb
Summary: Nora has nightmares and Hancock is there to comfort her.





	Smoke and Solace

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place between Chapter 13 - High Fidelity and Chapter 14 - Faith of Junkyard Dogs.

The nightmare began as it always did, with the cold and the terrible oppressive feeling that she couldn’t breathe. Nora was suspended, immobile and locked behind glass, behind ice. She could see Nate, holding Shaun, equally frozen, equally locked away. Then the man came, the man with the balding head and the rugged scar down his face.

 _Kellogg, his name was Conrad Kellogg_.

But her dream self didn’t know that, and could only struggle against the cold and the glass. She could only watch as Nate was thawed, as Shaun was wrestled from his strong arms, as the man shot her husband in the temple before coming to stare into her eyes like a promise waiting to be kept. Lately the dream had been changing. Now that Kellogg was dead and she had gotten inside his memories, Nora found herself changing position in the dream. Now it was she who shot Nate and stared into her own face trapped behind glass. Now _she_ was the monster and her frozen self was Kellogg. His eyes were always sympathetic in her dreams, his deep, raspy voice in her head.

“ _In another world I would have liked you, TV dinner. In another age I would have died for you.”_

 _“You did_ ,” she whispered in her dreams. “ _You died for me. You knew fully well what I was after, and you let me have it with only a token fight. You want me to destroy the Institute_.”

She always woke with a gasp, feeling so cold she couldn’t even shiver with it. She turned over in the big bed and burrowed into the only heat she’d found in the Commonwealth. Hancock’s arms came around her; he was always there when she woke, whether or not he had been asleep. He didn’t speak, didn’t offer empty comfort with words. Sometimes he offered her comfort with his body, but it was like he could read her like the books he loved so much, and knew when it wasn’t wanted. Like now. She took her comfort instead from his presence alone, in his hard embrace, in the feel of his ruffled shirt in her face, his leathery scent in her nose. He was her peace, her solid rock, her safe place to land.

Odd to think of such a man as being the one she turned to for solace. Bitter, angry, ruthless and jubilantly violent…Hancock was all those things. But he was also compassionate, loving, and even kind. She knew he didn’t believe it of himself, and would talk about how he’d eradicated his enemies without remorse, but she’d seen him on the road with her. He’d built settlements with her with his own two hands. He’d offered shelter to a homeless drifter they came across once, he’d offered a place by their fire with no questions asked, no recompense necessary. And he never, ever let her wake from her nightmares alone.

“Hancock,” she whispered in the dark once the worst of her tremors was over.

“Hmm?”

“I turned into Kellogg again,” she said. Hancock scooted up on the bed until he was sitting with his back against the headboard and he pulled her into his lap like a child. She snuggled into his shoulder. He didn’t judge or theorize and she was grateful. “Sometimes I wish I’d never woken up.”

He still didn’t speak, but he reached for his pack of cigarettes and lit one idly, letting the smoke drift from his ruined nose. She pulled the cigarette from his fingers and took a drag of it herself. Under her thighs she felt him stir. There was something unaccountably erotic for him in seeing her smoke. She felt the burn in her throat as she let out the smoke and took another drag before handing it back to him. Lighting up that first cigarette after so many years of not smoking hadn’t been nearly as hard as she thought it would be. But then again, she’d been under an extreme amount of stress at the time. Now…now it just seemed a bit foolish to worry about what the smoke would do to her lungs when there were so many faster ways to die in the Commonwealth, and she’d allowed it to become a habit again. And it seemed her favorite ghoul had a thing about watching her do it. She wasn’t above exploiting that for her own gain. She never got enough of him.

“Sometimes I wish I could have saved him…even if it was only from himself,” she whispered, coming back to the present and admitting at long last what had been nagging at her for months. In the heat of the moment she’d murdered him willingly, but once she’d gotten inside his head, her feelings changed. He hadn’t been born a monster, he’d become one due to circumstance. It could happen to her. It would happen, if she didn’t do anything to stop it.

Hancock tapped his cigarette against the ashtray he kept next to the bed and exhaled slowly. He had been up and about against her orders, she could tell from looking around the room. The desk she’d moved into his room at the State House was still there at the end of the bed, a single lantern burning on it, the top covered with folders and papers, topped with his glasses. She loved him in those glasses. It worked on her the way smoking worked on him.

“You were working, weren’t you?”

“’Course.”

“You still need rest,” she chided. He had only recently healed from a massive injury to his spinal cord, and no matter how often he told her he was indestructible because he was a ghoul, she knew he needed more time to recover. She was still recovering too; from her absolute terror at the possibility of his death. Hence the stress and the return to smoking.

“I need to be Mayor too,” he replied. “Can’t let you usurp all my glory. Next thing I know I’ll be out on the street and you’ll be the Mayor of Goodneighbor.”

“Thank you, but no. I have enough on my plate,” she said somewhat sourly. Her heart rate had settled and she was warm again, snuggled up to her own personal furnace. A dearth of breathable pores combined with a high amount of internal rads made ghouls very warm, and Hancock was no exception for all that his turning was from a chem and not fallout. “Besides, Charlie might have a problem with giving me the rent.”

“I doubt that. That old Handy loves you and he doesn’t love anyone.”

“Hmm,” she muttered and felt Hancock’s chest rumble with a chuckle.

“You don’t even realize it, do you?” Hancock continued, stubbing out the cigarette and reaching for a new one. “You wrap us all around your finger like string. One tiny pull and…poof, we’re all putty in your hands.”

“That analogy made no sense,” she joked, lifting her head to look into his face. His black eyes were amused. His head was bare, she noticed. He must have taken off his hat when he took off his frockcoat. He didn’t do that too often, he felt too self-conscious about being bald, but he did it around her. “Give me that,” she said, tugging the unlit cigarette from his hand and lighting it herself.

The flare of the flip lighter reflected off his eyes and his amusement turned to something else. She’d known it would, and wondered if he knew she’d changed her mind about what kind of comfort she was after. His hand tightened on her hip where it rested and she had her answer.

“You are such a tease, Sunshine,” he said, practically purring. She loved the sound of his voice. All smoke and whiskey. He was good at abusing himself with chems and alcohol, but his change had spared him the raw vocal chords of his irradiated peers.

“Why do you call me that?” she asked suddenly.

“The fire in your hair, the light in your eyes, the warmth radiating from your soul,” he replied immediately, as if he’d just been waiting for her to ask. “You light up my world with your brilliance. You are my sunshine. My one and only.”

And he kissed her, deftly taking the cigarette from her before she dropped it. His touch almost always made her nerveless and boneless. And ready. She turned on his lap so her legs were straddling him, her face in his. She thought that he actually liked how petite she was, that she could perch on him and still be at the right level for kissing. As he was happily demonstrating. His mouth scorched hers, leaving her breathless and wanting. He smiled; his cocky smile, the one that said he knew exactly what she wanted, but he was going to make her beg for it.

She leaned over and lifted the half burnt cigarette from the ashtray, dragging in a lungful and letting it out slowly to cloud around their heads. One side of her mouth quirked up as she felt the hard length of him beneath her grow more insistent. “Two can play this game, John,” she whispered.

“I know,” he whispered back.

He lifted up under her, bringing her knees right off the bed and she squealed in surprise, clutching at him with her free hand. He slid down the headboard a little, getting more comfortable, arranging the pile of pillows she always wanted just to his satisfaction. He let her finish the cigarette, growing harder with every drag, every exhalation of smoke, until she stubbed it out. Then he pushed her arms up over her head and pulled her shirt off over her head, tossing it somewhere in the gloom outside the lantern light.

“Fahr will yell at you for the mess,” she warned jokingly, knowing the inside joke between her lover and his second about his compulsive neatness.

“Let her,” he growled before his mouth enclosed her breast and his hands gripped her shoulders from behind, holding her in place. His tongue roved over her soft skin, tickling her until she squirmed. He loved that she was ticklish. She pushed him away, forcing him to sprawl back on the pillows while she worked on the buttons of his shirt. She understood why he held his body in scornful disdain, but she simply didn’t agree. She’d never known him any other way, and she had fallen for him as hard as she had, ghoulish skin and all.

She pushed the shirt off his shoulders and he actually helped for once, slipping his hands free of the cuffs as she tugged on the sleeves. She threw it over her shoulder in the direction her shirt had gone with an impish grin. He began to laugh until she started mapping his torso with her fingertips, stroking over grooves and hollows, bumps and wrinkles.

She leaned down to place a line of kisses down his breastbone, feeling his sharp intake of breath. She always remembered what he’d said about people not wanting to touch ghouls, how most would never do what she did without thinking. She wondered if it was because for her, he and his kind were just another feature of the wasteland she’d woken up to. She hadn’t seen their evolution, she hadn’t had to live amongst the prejudice and bigotry and scary tales of what ghouls were. The first ghouls she’d ever met had shown her nothing but kindness and it had set the stage for all that followed. She loved touching him. She was plainly fascinated with the texture of his skin, the rough leathery bits and smoother scarred parts all mixed together into one package. She often joked about how much she loved his half nose, how it stayed out of the way when they were kissing. She even loved his blackened eyes. They weren’t blank and emotionless to her. If anything, they reflected more than the average human’s eyes.

She’d worked her way down to his belly, but he stopped her from going lower. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy having her go down on him, it was more that he feared what it would do to her. Before she could fight him about it, he flipped her over, neatly coming to rest between her legs, pinning her into the pillows.

“Nuh uh, Sunshine. Not tonight.”

“You’re supposed to be resting,” she said.

“And you’re supposed to be sleepin'. Let’s neither of us complain, all right?”

“Okay,” she retreated meekly.

“Hey, what have I said about meek bullshit?”

“So fuck me already.”

“I'm gonna.” He tucked his chin, looking at her from beneath bare brows furrowed in a mock frown. Then he proceeded to take her apart, cell by cell.

His touch was enflaming, his mouth was ravenous. When he finally pulled back enough to shove his pants off, she was so beyond ready that she nearly came from just looking at him. He entered her in one smooth thrust, sealing himself in as far as he could go, his hipbones grinding into hers. She loved how he filled her, how he stretched her to the limit, loved how every bump and groove teased nerves that had never been so well teased with a normal human. She loved the sounds he made, his uneven breathing, the small groans as he bottomed out inside her, the quiet murmurings in her ear of his love for her.

They fit so well together, no matter how mismatched they were on the surface. She, all pre-war softness and a product of clean living; he, hard and spare and a product of both the wasteland and his own reckless abandon. It didn’t make sense that they should come together so well, should fit like puzzle pieces. But they did. And not just in this, in sex. In everything. They shared the same views on how the world should be, they were fearless about getting what they wanted, about reshaping the face of the Commonwealth. Her love for him went deeper than any she’d ever known, deeper even that her love for Nate had been. She never wanted it to end. Not ever.

 _‘Til death us do part_ , she thought. _I want to marry this man, make a mark on him that he is mine. I want to spend my life with him, forever and ever until I die_.

Her climax was so good it didn’t stop as he pounded into her, fierce and deep. She arched up to meet him, her hands clawing at his thighs to pull him closer still, her ankles locked around his back. With a groan he emptied into her, collapsing onto his elbows above her, his face buried in her neck. For long minutes the only sound was their mingled gasping breaths. He slipped out of her and stretched out beside her, tracing circles on her skin with his fingertips, watching the goosebumps rise.

“I didn’t take a Rad-X,” she said presently.

“Yeah, I know.” He dragged his eyes away from her bare stomach to her face. “How’s your level?”

“I can stand it.”

He didn’t argue. Once he would have, but the longer they were together, the more he trusted her to know how many rads were too many before she needed RadAway. And usually they were good about remembering the Rad-X ahead of time. He reached over her and pulled out another cigarette.

“Think you can sleep now?”

“Yes,” she sighed happily. She drifted off before he even had the cigarette lit, the back of her hand curled up against his racing heartbeat. It was her favorite place to be, so he stayed.

**Author's Note:**

> This was not the direction I had originally intended this to go, but they apparently had other ideas. But who doesn't crave a little ghoul lovin'?


End file.
